Silence
Kurtz, Stephen A.
II 1 | l From the silence of the psychoanalyst to the silence of God SILENCE STEPHEN A. KURTZ A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. Ecclesiastes 3:7 I. The SUence o f t h o Aazdyst T...
...But while silence in the hour is -- by definition -resistance, resistance may be no less communicative and illuminating than an unblocked chain of associations...
...Sometimes they are birth-moments of incorporation -- the patient takes the analyst in as a new object and an indestructible resource...
...The patient's effort now becomes directed at breaking the analyst's silence by giving more and more of what he believes the analyst wants to hear...
...If the process does not end here, the analysand moves to a stage where the structuredness of experience itself is understood as apparent and there is a greater capacity to accept and value a more aleatoric world...
...T HERE IS MORE than a kernel of truth in these caricatures...
...Yet few analysts have actually traced that unfolding...
...So, by extension, we pray to one another and to God in listening and speaking to one another from our hearts...
...It is not this anger that I am concerned with here - - at least not explicitly...
...I l L The S i l e n c e o f Ood I F WE RECOGNIZE the mystery in our capacity to hear one another fully then God's sentient silence is no more - - and no less - - mysterious...
...At such times the analyst can experience his silence as an awed breathholding...
...They are areas of organization that develop within the silence, knots of condensed energy in the field...
...Behind the cell door of his forced silence he was building a universe -- his refuge - - never knowing if anyone would share it...
...If these mysteries are equal, then prayer and human communication are on the same footing...
...W HAT IS centering...
...I felt so close to him, so full...
...But in the analytic process, the cognitive is inseparable from the existential...
...It is not that I begrudge Ninoy the outpouring of grief and indignation his death unleashed...
...Now it begins to feel like outfight denial...
...Watching his patients caught in silence's strings, the analyst can feel like a master of marionettes -- a subtle and invisible Svengali...
...In times of trouble, multitudes are dazzled by messiahs and demagogues who capture us with words...
...In such a life, God is not omnipresent (and thus also internal), he is merely out there...
...Within it, whatever occurs between the first and the fiftieth minutes finds an integral place...
...Silence demands an apprenticeship...
...And the experience includes not merely wordlessness, but the active suppression of speech...
...At the deepest level," he believed, "the anxiety of silence is death anxiety...
...The new awareness of his power can be intimidating...
...And they arisetas well in the crises of civilizations...
...If the silence is largely a stoppage of communication -- the suppressing of conflictful thoughts or feelings that are largely prec0nscious -- a few words of interpretation will often start the flow of speech again...
...This is the silence celebrated by Valrry - - that core of authentic existence from which one soul, wordlessly, grasps the reality of another: L'on se comprend sans vaines paroles Et sans dissiper par le bruit des voix La charme devin des iders folles . . . " After nearly a full session of silence, a patient in his midthirties who had been very spiky and argumentative during four years of treatment, described this fantasy: " I was sitting in a rocking chair giving my son his bottle...
...I will discuss the Philippines, what it is today, what it will be tomorrow...
...The patient's experience of one aspect of silence -- silence-as-death -- can be like Christ's harrowing of Hell, literally the passage between death and resurrection...
...For us clergy and religious of Bukidnon, the anger crystalized later into public protest at the ~.ANCISCO F. Ct~V~, S.J., recently resigned as bishop of Malaybalay, Bukidnon, Philippines...
...Then, having made room for God to enter, we become open to a new reality...
...If we here are only 'on leave from death' then all speech is only a fleeting interruption of the eternal silence...
...It is as if he holds in his two hands a globe of thin glass in which the primal world takes shape...
...The patient is not alone...
...In acquiring the art of silence the analyst can raise the childhood ghosts of home and school where, no matter how urgent his need to speak, silence was imposed upon him...
...If God's center is everywhere, therefore, he is at our centers, and prayer becomes the process by which we contact him through the centering of ourselves...
...In this way the analytic relationship belongs to the family of human relations that includes guru:novice and parent:child...
...Knowing no other way, we took these attentions for love, and when we come to recognize them for what they are, we are left pained, rageful, and then alone...
...This article is based on a speech given at Georgetown University...
...The patient wishes to avoid something difficult, at first substituting other things, but ultimately growing silent -like the analyst himself...
...The Philippines, an archipelago of some 7,400 islands, was settled thousands of years ago by seafaring folk either directly from mainland Asia or indirectly through island-Indonesia...
...Such "silences" are shocking...
...This is a period of intense anxiety in which silence is experienced as a loss of love accompanied by intense guilt and castration fears...
...Because his silence has ceased to be a technique (necessarily distinct from the user) but has grown to be a manifestation, it is no longer manipulative and controlling...
...The "agitated periphery" - - the constant buzz that surrounds the silent core - - consists greatly in the living out of painfully disturbed self-concepts and models for relationship...
...An intelligence informs it that seeks to discern the order in what simply is the case...
...Now the patient may begin to wish the analyst dead or to entertain the thought that he may actually be dead...
...There are nodal moments (hours, weeks) when the long work seems to distill itself in crystalline form...
...Well individuated people can share times of deep appreciation - - a sentiment I associate with the ability to love without blurring one's boundaries...
...Reik's discussion -- valuable for its uniqueness -- traces the patient's reaction to an implacably silent analyst...
...If responses are not required, what can we count on...
...Both caricatures also reveal a sadistic element: the good doctor must practice his cure even at the cost of his patient's life...
...All along the way, the analyst's uninflected silence stands for the noumenal order, different in kind from any system of organized experience...
...Since, in the most obvious way, the patient's silence breaks the fundamental rule by denying verbal access to the unconscious (in the limited sense of primary process) it is resistance par excellence...
...The * Without recourse to words, each to the other known, Unbroken by our voices' cannonade We hold this fragile world our dreams have made...
...Schematically, one progresses from a condition in which perception is Commonweal: 138 well but mistakenly organized to a breakdown and restructuring of perception in better accord with some socially acknowledged reality...
...First, the initial perception of the analyst's silence as benevolent interest is never lost...
...And let me try not letting the anger to which I just admitted intrude...
...But for Reik, and others Jaf his generation, silence could only be perceived negatively...
...Moreover, by breaking this code a landmark is lost and we step into an uncharted world...
...Benedict and the sayings of the Desert Fathers already assume a Biblical history...
...In this way, any point can be taken as the world's center with each individual creature in some concentrated way mirroring and expressing its Creator...
...Viewed this way, silence is equated with death...
...Functionally, this silence mirrors the speech of another archetypal figure -- Dr...
...By the end of the century, we were duly Christianized and conquered (not necessarily in that order - - the reverse is truer) except for the mountain tribes of northern Luzon and the Muslim peoples of Mindanao and Sulu in the south - - enclaves of resistance to the cross and sword of the Spaniards...
...From a popular point of view, the power of the analyst's silence is more accessible than its aesthetics...
...Thus power, indeed omnipotence, are also part of this experience...
...Any artist who acquires proficiency in a technique revels for a while in its exercise...
...In 1521, Magellan stumbled on us and we were declared "discovered...
...And having done so, a deep inner peace becomes possible...
...We do not have to distort them to find acceptance...
...If God is infinite and incomprehensible, what is the relationship between man and GOd that would make prayer possible...
...Nicholas evolved a response that, despite its conceptual strangeness, carries intuitive weight...
...But for most analysts, the capacity for silence is acquired through discipline...
...THE PHILIPPINES--YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW Free even enslavement FRANCISCO F. CLAVER T HERE WAS HORROR - - worldwide, universal - - at the blood spilled on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport in August when Ninoy Aquino was felled by an assassin's bullet...
...Being disoriented in this way heightens the analyst's sensitivity to all the events of the hour -- but above all to the power of the living word...
...Reik's poetic insight is misleading...
...We have come to recognize what God is not, but we have no new concept to put in its place...
...Unlike the quietness of the forest, or of the moon, it is filled with intention...
...But God "out there" is reduced to an inflated parent - - alternately smiling or frowning, rewarding, punishing, promising, threatening - - as we succeed or fail in being good children...
...So, for Reik, the expression 'dead silent' is redundant...
...The relative silence of the more usual analyst does undergo changes in meaning for the patient as the treatment unfolds, but I would trace this evolution differently...
...So pardon me if I express myself with not a little anger...
...This too is an achievement since it represents a state of profound trust that is the result of successfully laying aside outmoded defenses...
...Neither is it the silence of the sea bottom that receives all things unknowingly...
...But silence is shocking even in itself because it breaks a basic social code...
...Then I had the sense that you were holding me as I was holding him, very lovingly...
...The S i l e n c e o f t h e P a t i e n t ALMOST ALL of the earlier psychoanalytic papers silence, on beginning with Ferenczi"s "Silence is Golden ' (1916) speak of the patient's silence as a resistance phenomenon...
...The same process of centering becomes equally critical for contacting our own central selves and one another's, which can be seen as forms of prayer...
...But on this level below the sublime we are moved in very human ways...
...The transition from one interpretation of silence to another is by no means as obvious as it may seem at first glance...
...They may lack the depth of his later work when a fully integrated technique became the perfect expression of his being...
...It is a kind of annihilation...
...He is on the faculty of the Institute for Expressive Analysis and is completing a book for Jason Harrison on the phenomonology of the analytic hour...
...John Cage, whose own work (especially 4'31 ") exemplifies this principle, writes of Morton Feldman that he has "changed the responsibility of the composer from making to accepting...
...To this stage of development, for example, belongs Bach's D Minor Toccata and its breathtaking Fugue...
...How else but in silence could this primitive non-verbal state be revived...
...But his pride is inseparable from his shame...
...Since the patient is paying for words, the analyst cheats and deprives him with his silence...
...questions themselves, however, are symptomatic...
...The three of us were nested like a set of Chinese boxes, like a sort of Trinity...
...Yet, since language is the instrument of Reason, we cannot speak of this synthesis...
...Reik observed that this silence is experienced in the beginning as benevolent interest...
...It means at best a mysterious apprehension...
...This is especially true in the communication of experiences which were themselves nonverbal or which belonged to a pre-verbal stage of development...
...Patient and analyst transcend the working alliance to share in a state of communion...
...It is with these armoring and distorting defenses thatwe approach God, ourselves, and others - - impenetrable to the actuality of our experience...
...The analyst's growth in silence is precisely a growth in acceptance...
...Now, having become capable of virtuosity, his silence can also be plainly cruel...
...But the pain is there nonetheless at the unnoticed, unmourned killings-in-the-mass of countless other Filipinos who died - - and are still dying - - for the same reasons that Aquino was shot...
...But little by little it changes its meaning...
...When they do, the questions - - and the answers - - seem to echo from age to age...
...The tension is not, as he would have it, between silence and speech, but between life and death, either of which may modify these and other categories of experience...
...In this way Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn committed reams of writing to memory in the camp of Ekibastuz...
...The pattern was there early on...
...This silence makes no judgments, imposes no demands...
...Then the analyst must pay exquisite attention to his own reactions...
...The purpose of the stock analyst's silence and of Baloardo' s cascade of Latin jargon is the same: to preserve the difference in status between doctor and patient...
...it merely counsels silence...
...This fantasy can be expressed in the feeling that the analyst is at a great distance...
...Then as the fhrst serious resistance becomes manifest, the analyst's silence takes on the quality of a refusal to speak...
...9 March 1984:141...
...To accept whatever comes regardless of the consequences is to be unafraid or to be full of that love which comes from a sense of atoneness with whatever...
...Little by little his silence erodes their defenses, rendering them infantlike and hungry...
...Archeologists and anthropologists are still hard at it proposing theory after exotic theory about the beginnings of the various peoples who were the predecessors of the eighty and more language groups of today...
...And it is precisely in times of trouble that the analyst's 9 March 1984:137 help is sought...
...I In renouncing speech -- even in this circumscribed way -we yield up something fundamentally human -- a central means for declaring and expressing our existence...
...These are healing passages in a relationship...
...T HE VALUE of an uninflected, attentive silence has been noted by virtually every writer on the subject...
...But in some sense it cannot be shared...
...The problem of the possibility of communication - - between man and man and between man and God - - is an ancient one and cannot be said to have been answered once for all...
...But before that discovery is made, the emptiness can be devastating...
...When we cease to serve a narcissistic God, who demands that we be for him, our own healthy narcissism gains support...
...It is against this ground that the patient struggles both to maintain and to dismantle his defenses...
...We would need the witness of those -- censored poets and prophets -- who, in the very midst of their feilowmen, were placed under bans of silence...
...you've gone away") and a clear space in which he is seen as listening with care while the patient struggles toward a new sense of himself and the world...
...Among them, Theodore Reik's 1926 lecture on "The Psychological Meaning of Silence" remains unique...
...The choice of speaking or not speaking comes within his conscious control...
...Silence is the only truthful response...
...The space cleared for his entry may at first be experienced as a deserted silence...
...In this way, the analyst is heir to an ancient ascetic tradition...
...From this inclusive position, the syncopated unfolding in advances and retreats, the arhythmic progress and regress of the hour, appear sufficiently beautiful...
...Equally self-conscious is the journeyman analyst's sense of the aesthetic value of his silence...
...Because of this he can experience himself as cruel and ungenerous...
...If he fails to transcend this view they will become truly inert or else will leave him diminished and alone...
...But no matter what and how much he produces, the silence continues...
...It does not force an order upon the hour...
...Tears welled up...
...In the beginning, was the word, but before this there was the great silence...
...It becomes a liberating possibility because, unlike the death-silence of the patient's infancy, this expedition is made jointly...
...I STEPHEN A. KURTZ i$ a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City...
...Moreover, this concept of God is animated by primitive, magical thinking and so the believer - - who feels like a child - - is more comfortable with the institutionalized magic of parent-like religious structures Commonweal: 140 mediating and formalizing his relationship to the Big Parent...
...The principle of contradiction does not apply to him and he can only be "understood" as the synthesis of opposites (con.iunctum oppositum...
...The patient's reactions to the analyst's silences (as well as the patient's own silences) reveal the workings of integrative drives as well as of resistances...
...But silence can also be self-imposed -- a gesture that, in the arts, contains an avant-garde ideal...
...The loss of the old God - - however nagging or infantilizing he may have been - - can be experienced as a desertion...
...The stage of the analyst's development in which he takes self-conscious pleasure in the power of silence is a necessary one...
...There was none - - or at least none loud enough, noticeable enough to make a difference - - at the flood of blood that had been flowing in the Philippines prior to that one murder...
...Such interventions have a value of their own...
...So Benedict, quoting Proverbs and the Psalms, counsels that "frequent leave to talk not be granted those advanced in perfection, even though the subject be good, holy, and edifying...
...For this reason it contains the possibility of unexpected insight and freedom...
...Then, with one word, he can feed them and earn that measure of gratitude only children can offer...
...And liberation is the purpose of this descent as well...
...One drop and the cloudy liquid turns a limpid green...
...At the heart of the silence there was Him Who is all stillness, all peace, all poise...
...Or it can assume a Romantic caste: the rigorous, delicately nuanced beauty of silence -- his creation -- draws him into its vortex...
...In part, it is the process by which we move from the agitated periphery of our lives - - and which we tend to identify with our lives tout court -- to a silent interior space that, however empty it may appear, will reveal itself as indescribably full...
...If the analyst can transcend technique, as well as the particularities of his own silence, then he can enter into this experience with his patient...
...Now he has become his silence, which is nothing less than the expression of his particular way of being...
...They do not arise except in contexts where faith in the communality of experience and in God's presence have been disturbed...
...For example, silence can be the medium in which many subtle issues of identity formation belonging to the earliest developmental phases are played out...
...The analyst feels such episodes to be beautiful and precious...
...Indeed, the analyst sitting in stony silence behind the couch, has become a stock figure of our age...
...To capture the feeling of forced silence would require the testimony of children forbidden to speak, or of criminals before the Enlightenment whose lips and tongues were amputated for blaspheming...
...It is an anger that has been with us ever since we woke up to an eerie silence one morning .-- September 22, 1972, to be exact -- and found to our consternation we had become a nation of slaves...
...Baloardo of the Italian Comedy...
...The analyst's silence is alternately a dark closet into which the patient's worst fears are projected ("you find me boring...
...First he argued by mathematical analogy that God, as infinite Being, is "He whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere...
...Because he could never lose me, I knew that the end of the analysis was in sight...
...Reik concludes that this development traces "a return of feeling which played an important role in the patient's relationship to an old love object -- from the original tenderness to the embitterment over an imagined or actual denial...
...We take in the teaching while incorporating (adoring) the man...
...This concept is perfectly expressed in Jesus's startling assertion: "I am the way, the truth, and the life...
...This disorientation is shared by both analyst and patient...
...No, his death was horrendous beyond belief and deserved all the condemnation it received...
...nor can we understand it...
...Within this context, interpretations, questions, comments, inflected silences, all continue to occur...
...Some may have a talent for silence...
...To be reborn out of this silence can be experienced as sudden revelation or, less dramatically, as a slow, episodic unfolding of new value...
...It also belongs to the family of spiritual paths explicitly or implicitly outlined by various religious systems...
...We cease to be merely infantile adults - - unconsciously repeating patterns of living developed in infancy - - we become childlike indeed...
...I knew that I could never lose you, just as my son can never lose me...
...Ecclesiastes 3:7 I. The SUence o f t h o Aazdyst T HE ANALYST offers his silence as a sanctuary for all the elements of the hour...
...But, increasingly in the last twenty-five years, there has been a willingness to question the conventional view of silence as simple resistance and to explore its integrative values...
...killing, in one of our'parishes shortly after that fateful September day, of a man suspected of "subversion" while still detained in jail...
...Very gradually, the analyst achieves technical mastery...
...There is guilt for not speaking...
...They arise at times of crisis in the lives of individual people...
...Or there can be a joyful 9 March 1984:139 mingling of feelings that is not threatening but revitalizing...
...Concerning silence, the Rule of St...
...It is no stranger that we are heard by an infinite being, in no way comparable to ourselves, than that we - - shut up in our skins, each one a unique congeries of private experience - - should participate in one another's joys and pains...
...The poignancy of such moments can, of course, be talked about...
...In notebooks and publications he sets them in bezels of his most careful prose...
...This ground -- which gives meaning not only to words but to passages of inflected silence -- is never neutral...
...In the space of a life in which we are unknown to ourselves and to one another, how can God be other than a stranger...
...The silence of the "perfect" hour is not the analyst's only aesthetic response...
...They reflect one view of the analyst's function as reinterpreter/teacher (a cognitive/emotive function), in contrast to the view of him as container/presence (an existential function...
...His silence enables or provokes a multitude of responses in his patients that reveal everything about them -- leaving him perfectly castled in anonymity...
...Now our talents, our selves, are gifts to him...
...For he also senses the condescension in treating patient and process as his creations...
...In this silence, the patient may experience himself being held in a deep symbiotic union...
...Others are possessed by it...
...It is, to a degree, an art-for-art's-sake aesthetic, divorced from the function of therapy...
...Thus his silence includes not only the words and gestures of each participant, but also the routine sounds of neighborhoods, the heat, the lingering traces of cigars and perfume...
...But at a price...
...Literally overnight...
...If God is infinite, he reasoned, then his reality transcends the logic by which human thought is governed...
...In this, Nicholas prefigures Wittenstein whose dictum "Worth Mann nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss Mann schweigen" does not discount the reality of what lies beyond language...
...But I would like to preface what I have to say with a little of yesterday, for the past explains something of the present, and both together do the same for the future...
...In a gentle way, it contains it...
...More poignantly than any other, the encounter with a silent patient reveals the two-person nature of the analytic process...
...To discover that our lives are "rooted in a silence that is not death but life" one must first keep quiet...
...Many shared silences between analyst and patient, between lovers and friends, are concentrated moments of communion...
...In the tremulo between excitement and anxiety that charged the early Renaissance, Nicholas faced the incomprehensibility of God...
...Thus if speech and silence seem to us to be verbal expressions of life and death drives, it becomes clear to us that silence came before speech, that speech arose from silence as life from death...
...It was in such an atmosphere of doubt and upheaval that Nicholas of Cusa asked these questions, and proposed some curiously fertile answers...
...Perhaps for that reason the psychoanalytic literature, with its inevitable focus on the knottier moments in the process, offers little technical and even less clinical material on the subject...
...And the analyst must preserve his technique even if his patient suffers...
...Rimbaud exchanged his poetry for slave trading and Duchamp his complex visual art for chess...
...Sometimes, centered at the heart of his silence, he appreciates the perfection of things as they are...
...I will dwell on today and tomorrow...
...Such moments foreshadow the masterly silence of the analyst's maturity...
...The purpose of that mythical foray into Limbo, after all, was to liberate the souls held captive since the death of Adam...
...Inexorably the silence goes on...
...He takes them out for colleagues to admire...
...As they are ever more deeply analyzed, and we become more open to the truth of our lives as children, we become increasingly vulnerable...
...And keeping quiet entails anxiety...
...Because silence is a learned technique, the analyst who has not yet made it his own can feel himself gagged -- silenced against his will...
...I did not enter into silence," said Ezra Pound," silence captured me...
...Even the analyst speaks against the background of his silence...
...Much more is required when silence is the primary nlode of communication and the material is largely unconscious...
...This is, of course, part of the meaning of loving God in loving one another...
...Thus a first stage of prayer, as centering, consists in the psychoanalysis of God...
...This wisdom recognizes that the experience of silence may reveal to the practitioner what even the best words cannot...
...Hard scholarship needs hard cash, and we do not have that kind of money to dig out our past...
...When we feel adored by God, just as we are, we come into a new relation to ourselves that aff'u'rns our power and lovability...
...Moreover, it has a history in the analyst's sacrifice of speech, which is sacrifice in a very literal sense -- an offering of something valuable for a still more valued purpose...
...The anger was there too, righteous but impotent...
...Although this process is especially concerned with the transference to God of the childhood relationship with the parents, it becomes inseparable from the analysis of the character and other defenses that develop in the context of that primal relationship...
...They identify silence with resistance and death, and speech with life...
...But then, as Georges Bernanos discovered, "Suddenly I perceived that the silence was a presence...
...When the analyst's silence maintains this quality, it becomes the cantus firmus against which the patient's motives unfold...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
